On the Unix front, server unit sales went down by almost a third and revenues fell 22 per cent.

"Regarding the future of Unix and RISC and EPIC, those platforms will become niche and mainly used to high-end database as continued innovation on x86 both on the software and OS side close the RAS performance gap with proprietary systems," the IDC man said.

Resellers reckon that Unix is coming under renewed pressure from x86 with more and more customers migrating to industry standard systems.

"The argument will ultimately come down to cost," said one channel source. "The reason for going to Unix was resilience but we are seeing more robustness on x86 which is a more flexible architecture," said one.

There still seems to be a major play in the market for mainframes – the ultimate resilience – but Unix will be squeezed in the middle, dealers argued.

IDC data shows CISC shipments climbed 27 per cent and the market value of those systems grew 14 per cent. Ux86 unit sales fell 1 per cent but revenues increased by the same amount.

Out of the major operating systems, only z/OS represented substantial growth, up 27 per cent in unit terms and 14 per cent in value.

Market leader HP declined 9 per cent in terms of customer revenues and Oracle fell 2 per cent. IBM and Dell climbed 3 per cent and 13 per cent respectively. Cisco – which has a very small server segment – was up 267 per cent.

Martinez said some high-end x86 SKUs were impacted by HDD shortages following the flooding in Thailand. ®